If you are a Veteran or service-member you’ve probably heard it before -- someone finds out your military affiliation (or you are strutting around in that old, too tight-fitting RANGER school T-shirt that your wife accidentally keeps leaving in the rag bin) so they reach out their hand and say, “Thank you for your military service!” And unless you are angling for a free Veteran meal at Applebee’s or something you probably did what I usually do – you thanked them, let them know you didn’t really do much, and went on your way feeling a bit funny inside.

Teenage runaway at Fort Benning's School for Boys

Let’s face it, we didn’t join the military to serve anybody. In fact, I joined at the tender age of 18 to run away from home (signed the week after my birthday, left for boot camp three days after my high school graduation). I went back in a second time because the Army funded my four years of beer and pool at Providence College and I owed them.

Most men of my generation joined because we wanted to do more than just hang out at our old high school haunts working a dead-end job.

Our fathers were drafted, our grandfathers served in WWII, and it was just REASONABLE for us to follow in that tradition. Whether drafted or volunteered, military service was once considered a REASONABLE duty of citizenship.

For young people today it still is, despite the on-going never-ending “war on terror” (if they can get in -- you need to be like an Eagle Scout, have a College Degree, or preferably, be a motivated young female to even get in these days). It’s a sign of our collective national selfishness that military service is no longer considered REASONABLE but EXTRAORDINARY. All you need to do is complete basic training and people will treat you like a war hero. But you’re not. And every Veteran knows that -- whether they served in combat or not. We are not heroes just because we performed our REASONABLE service.

Believe it or not, this is not a mug shot! 11B AIT veteran tryin' to be hard -- Note 1983 era military haircut...

So it is in the Kingdom of God. Making our life a “living sacrifice” i.e. putting God’s Will first in our life and fulfilling the obligations we have toward Jesus Christ as believers, all we do for Jesus, is merely our reasonable service. Grace doesn’t mean we don’t “do anything.” Grace means Jesus paid the full-price for our salvation. All we need to do is believe and follow Him… which is reasonable. But following Jesus means we are going to have to sacrifice our life. And for that we deserve… nothing. He already gave us all we never deserved by paying for our sin with His own blood on Calvary’s Cross. We should thank Him and soldier on. It’s reasonable.

Thanking a Vet for their service is a nice civil gesture so please continue. But be leery of putting them on a pedestal most of us Vets know we really don’t deserve. The ones you SHOULD thank, who you MUST thank and whom you CANNOT thank are the ones who can’t receive thanks… because they made the ultimate sacrifice and never came home. Those are the ones the rest of us know deserve all the thanks we receive in their place.

And the rest of America should strive to be a little better because of them. It’s reasonable.

I get asked the question all the time. "What was it like when you were in the Rangers?" People have heard I was an Army Ranger, that I did some "classified stuff" (which they immediately associate with the last Navy SEAL Hollywood action movie they saw), and worse, some of them remember there was a Tim Moynihan in the book/movie, Black Hawk Down. So... in the interest of full-disclosure... and because I don't want to end up on the wrong side of one of those stolen valor YouTube videos, let me set the record straight. I never served in the Ranger Battalion or Special Forces, I did not deploy to Afghanistan or Iraq, and while I spent a little over a year as an 11B (that's the Army specialty code for infantryman) in the old Army Reserve system (back in ancient times) I spent most of my active duty time as a tactical intelligence officer. I was lucky enough to go to some pretty cool schools and wear some pretty cool badges -- Airborne, Ranger and Air Assault -- so the truth is, I was what can best be described as a Hollywood Intel-Weenie Ranger.

There, I said it. It's out there, on the record and the massive weight of my non-operator status guilt is finally gone. I am free.

Ranger Tab ready for the O Club

Actually most of the good men (and women) I served with, some of whom were pretty high speed grunts, paratroopers, Special Forces and Ranger types, were kind enough to refer to me as a "high speed Intel guy" (which means I had more and cooler patches on my uniform than the average Intel guy). Meanwhile, the real intel-weenies, the kind who worked the racks all-night with headphones, slaved away as analysts in SCIFs ("SCIF" - Google it. Even Hillary Clinton doesn't know what that means, the FBI asked her) or conducted for-real CI/HUMINT ops whether it was a Cold or a Hot war, really did do some high-speed stuff... while "high speed Intel guys" (Hollywood Intel-weenie Rangers) like me strutted around the base gym in our Ranger T-shirts bragging about our bench press.

Believe me, I am not ashamed of my accomplishments. Especially Ranger School (I still wear that T-shirt... even though my wife keeps "accidentally" leaving it in the rag bin). Maybe about 3-5% of soldiers get to attend Army Ranger School. And only about half of them will make it (Before 1980 only about 35% made it -- I attended in 1990). And I had the pleasure of going when it was 72 days long and included a Desert Phase at Dugway Proving Ground. Desert Shield was on and we got stuck with 1 box lunch per day of prison fare instead of the single MRE per day usually served to candidates. Today's Ranger School candidates have it easy -- two MRE's a day and their own batman to carry their ruck for them (just kidding about the batman).

Okay, truth be told, there's more to my story than just Ranger School. And I did do some pretty cool things after I got out, when I was a DOD civilian and defense contractor, but I don't want to go there. If I told you about that stuff I'd have to kill you.